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Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group
Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group
Start date: Nov 1, 2014,
End date: Oct 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
The Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group project is the result of a 4 European business incubators collaboration, having various approaches in working with youth enterprises: one cooperative from Italy (Impact HUB Syracuse) - member of one of the largest co-working spaces networks in the world, the Macedonian Foundation Business StartUP Center from Bitola - having wide experience in developing hundreds of businesses in very diverse industries, a higher education & VET institution in Netherlands functioning as an alternative business school (Team Academy Netherlands), and one NGO organized as a business incubator for young people in Romania (CROS, the Alternative University program).
The partnership developed is meant for the partners to gain expertise to help them build their capacity, being sustainable and scale, and to develop innovative and easy to share practices (the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset) for youth incubation programs designers around Europe.
The toolset will be built based on the experience of the four participating organisations, but also taking into consideration the current state-of-the-art of youth incubators, and tested within the most important European entrepreneurship hubs (London, Madrid, Amsterdam, one major Italian city and Berlin). The toolset will be disseminated to European universities, business incubators, foundations, investors and governments, willing to design and develop youth entrepreneurship enabling programs. To assure transferability and the sustainability of the project, we will develop a support service for those who want to better implement the methodology developed and use the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset.
The EYE Support Group core group will be made of 12 staff members of the four partner organizations (3 people from each organization), all having experience in creating and developing different incubation programs and in working with young entrepreneurs, as trainers, educational, service or product designers, youth workers, facilitators, business coaches or consultants, networkers and partnership developers, program and project managers or developers, innovators, or strategists.
The flow of activities will consist in five main type of activities: (1) Project management and implementation activities, (2) Intellectual Outputs development and delivery (the Youth Entrepreneurship Enabling Programs State around Europe and the Globe - an online publication and infographics associated, and the Incubation-outside-the-Box ToolSet - educational physical product, website and support service associated), (3) A transnational project meeting dedicated to dissemination and sustainability measures design, (4) Dissemination workshops and online specific activities (will include five dissemination workshops held in few of the most vibrant European cities when it comes to entrepreneurship), and (5) Engaging learning activities - three sharing sessions based seminars, each with a study visits associated, and an expert training.
The project will use innovative methodologies used for every stage of the project. To ensure the successful implementation of the activities, we will use the work breakdown structure organization method. To develop the incubation-outside-the-box toolset, we will use product design and manufacturing methodologies, such as design thinking and design for six sigma.To make the best out of this collaboration, throughout the entire project and in sharing sessions we will use partnership brokering and facilitation methods, while in the dissemination workshop we will use co-creation methodologies in order to gather valuable feedback from main users.
The project will impact the participating organizations, in the first place, by raising their business incubators performance measured by the number of enterprises developed each year, their generated revenue and the time of an incubation cycle. Also, we expect that this project will raise the awareness and credibility of the organizations involved and open the door for new international collaborations on similar topics. Moreover, the dissemination workshops hosted by other similar organizations will help and inspire them to create better incubation processes. Finally, we will create an easy to use toolset that will ensure the knowledge transfer for any interested organization, by the the support service created will help other youth business incubation programs to be born, grow and scale, thus promoting youth entrepreneurship incubation programs enabled, as a key tool in tackling unemployment, across Europe.
Looking at the European level, we believe that the knowhow transfer facilitated by the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset it is of real value for business incubation and entrepreneurial education programs with special address to youth, but also as a model of cooperation among peers as a communities of practice knowledge sharing and building.